In a mass meeting just days after getting out of jail, he depicted blacks as alone in an indifferent nation: “Don’t you ever think that anything is going to be given to us in this struggle.” Toward the end of the letter, King wrote, “I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham.” Where did he find such certainty? Ultimately, it was rooted in his belief, stated elsewhere, that “the Lord will make a way out of no way” and “there is a balm in Gilead.” Yet in his letter King offered none of this. It was as if he viewed the white ministers as unworthy of spiritual sharing. (In a mass meeting a few weeks later, he would gibe, “They are all pitiful.”)
Nor did King draw confidence from the idea that America was destined for democracy. While he did mention that “we will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham ... because the goal of America is freedom,” this is a brief aside and not his central point. Rather, King found optimism in his deep faith in black people. At its core, the “Letter” was a proclamation of black self-sufficiency. King began his paean to black majesty with the line “abused and scorned though we may be,” a reference to the slavery-era spiritual “’Buked and Scorned,” which evokes the slaves’ suffering and their conviction that “Jesus died to set me free.” It was a touchstone for King, a link to his revered forebears, and one he referenced repeatedly. “Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny. Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched across the pages of history the mighty words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here.”
Reading those lines on paper barely hints at the force of those stanzas as King usually spoke them: a defiant assertion of a black right to belong that rested on something more primal than, and prior to, the nation’s official documents and civic heroes.